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Tag Archives: Robert Caro

In the black art of recent years, Thomas Chatterton Williams sees parables of wokeness: a worldview that sees historical black suffering stretching backward and forward through the generations, marked by fatalism and deeply skeptical of any notion of progress. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award last night, represents his first woke novel, Williams writes, and that makes it a radical departure from Whitehead’s previous work, arguably not for the better: “It’s difficult to accept that Whitehead really did squeeze himself into the artistic confines of wokeness. I would prefer to believe that the story he has given us operates on at least two levels, the second of which many of his new admirers may not immediately notice. I would like to think that he recognizes the patterns we are in thrall to, the ways we have come to rely on concepts such as the legacy of American slavery not as historical fact or even societal debt but as parable, as a teachable moment that can’t be—and never should be—conclusively apprehended. It’s a lesson that gains meaning not in the teaching but in the reteaching. It is here, in the realm of the parable, that most black art right now is being made … But the question remains whether parables of wokeness are the most effective tools for the task. Can you really extinguish a fire with more flames? Can you ever hope to disrupt a cycle of inequality by insisting ever more adamantly that it has and will always exist? At their best, artists like Whitehead show us another possibility.”

Remember nerds—the nerds in high school movies? They seem so quaint now, don’t they, always getting shoved into lockers for their squirmy, pale, quietly noble nerd ways. Today’s “nerds,” by contrast, are busy spewing hate online and constructing a massive white-nationalist machine. It makes you wonder, as Willie Osterweil writes, what the notion of “nerdiness” was really obfuscating all along: “The nerd appeared in pop culture in the form of a smart but awkward, always well-meaning white boy irrationally persecuted by his implacable jock antagonists in order to subsume and mystify true social conflict—the ones around race, gender, class, and sexuality that shook the country in the 1960s and ’70s—into a spectacle of white male suffering. This was an effective strategy to sell tickets to white-flight middle-class suburbanites, as it described and mirrored their mostly white communities. With the hollowing out of urban centers, and the drastic poverty in nonwhite communities of the ’80s and ’90s, these suburban whites were virtually the only consumers with enough consistent spending money to garner Hollywood attention.”

Because your summer is a never-ending slog and all your beach reads have disappointed you, we thought you’d want to peruse these twointerviews from our Spring issue. Once available only to subscribers, they’re now available to everyone, everywhere. No need to thank us. (Unless you want to subscribe.)

Behold: our new Spring issue, with a cover by Adrian Tomine and a shade of yellow bright enough to bring the thaw. It includes an Art of Nonfiction interview with Luc Sante, who talks about growing up in the New York of the seventies and eighties and his fascination with “the intersection of specific time and place”:

This goes back to my teenage years. I would think, Jeez, 1972 feels so different from 1971 … I meant the feeling on the street, the feeling emanated by people, songs, the contents of the songs, what people were wearing. Trying to reproduce that elusive factor—it’s something I’ve tried to write about many, many times, and it’s impossible. I can only do it, kind of, by indirection. But my spelunking in that direction has nourished a lot of my work.

Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.

Someone sent me this text message yesterday: “What’s a book I should read to make girls think I’m smart in a hot way? I want to seem like a douchey intellectual instead of my deadbeat self.” What should I tell him?

Sincerely,A

Dear A,

The correct answer is probably that your friend should be secure in his tastes, find someone who loves him for who he is, and not worry about impressing anyone. Many movies have demonstrated the pitfalls of posturing and the inevitable public unmasking that follows. That said, our job here is to try to answer questions, and as such, I took the unusual step of soliciting a range of answers from both men and women. (My own immediate response was to offer the following formula: worst book of great author, a gambit that men of this type also apply to albums, i.e. Metal Machine Music, which they will claim is underrated.) Then too, there is the dual nature of the question: Does the author wish to come across as a poseur for some reason, or attract a woman of substance? If his goal is (inexplicably) the former, the female contingent offered the following names: Madness and Civilization; The Power Broker; Žižek (any), The Brothers Karamazov. (All worthy reads, needless to say, but often used for ostentatious or intimidating purposes.) And, added one, “I like DFW, but he’s the novelist equivalent of a neg.”

As to books the women whom I spoke to found appealing (and please note that this implies actual reading, not use as props): At Swim Two Birds, The Beauty Myth, “any book read twice.” Elaborated one: “Extra points for Martin Amis memoir, minus points for other Martin Amis nonfiction. Someone who actually appears to be reading William Gaddis for real and not just carrying it around will always rate a second glance. And a straight man reading Mary Gaitskill would be nearly irresistible to me.”

When faced with the same question, male correspondents provided the following terse responses: “Cantos, Pound.” “Kathy Acker.” “Sontag.”

“Portnoy’s Complaint,” said one, “may as well be Yiddish for douche.”

Others were more expansive. “How about Laszlo Kraszahorkai’s Satantango? It’s ostentatious, hip, handsomely designed (looks great on a bedside table), and comes with seals of approval from Sontag, Sebald, and James Wood. It is also, for the most part, unreadable.”

“Gravity’s Rainbow, all the completed Caro LBJ books, Brothers Karamazov. But if you really want ‘I am a brooding intellectual with an effortless knowledge of contemporary culture,’ I think Matterhorn is tough to top.”

“There’s a difference,” remarked one colleague, “between getting a girl to think you’re smart, and getting a girl to WANT to talk to you. The following are books that will make girls want to talk to you.

—Greatest pick-up book of all time is Just Kids by Patti Smith, because every girl has read it and they ALL want to talk about it.—Any book ever written by Haruki Murakami—The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—White Album by Joan Didion—What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver—The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. (Don’t question it. Just trust.)”

And in corroboration, one fellow says: “If it means anything, the only time a girl ever sat down and started talking to me out of nowhere was when I was reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem in college. Didion has an effect on people.”

Take this for what it’s worth, and we hope you actually find a book you love in the process.

“Some poems smack of a gentility one would like in some moods to smack out of them.” Even before I read that sentence—about the sainted Elizabeth Bishop!—I knew Maureen McLane was the poetry teacher for me. Her first book of criticism, My Poets, is the survey course of my dreams: a long, loving argument with and about everyone from Chaucer to Gertrude Stein. As befits her subject, McLane is both plainspoken and lyrical, falling at times, as if naturally, into verse as clear as her prose. —Lorin Stein

I remember a college professor commenting that he was never sure Stephen Crane “knew what he was doing” when he dropped all sorts of clues and oddness into his stories. I had the same thought while reading Barbara Comyns’s 1959 book, The Vet’s Daughter. Does all this strangeness serve a purpose? Does the bizarre ending mean something? Whether the answer is yes or no, I still enjoyed the novel more than anything I’ve read in months, and I’ve already ordered the rest of her books. —Sadie Stein

Robert Caro—never disappointing—had a particularly good piece in the April 2 edition of The New Yorker, on John F. Kennedy’s assassination but from LBJ’s perspective. It’s a bizarre and fascinating tale of how history is formed both by monumental events and by intimate details. And that famous photograph of his swearing in—as he stands grim-faced and flanked by Lady Bird and Jackie—will never look the same to me again. —Nicole Rudick

It wasn’t the intimidating length or experimental style that had me wondering, Wait, what?, when reading Finnegans Wake. It was my damned curiosity about the “careful teacakes” that Joyce introduces. My foodie heart salivated at the thought—where do I get one of those? Luckily, I stumbled upon A Trifle, a Coddle, a Fry: An Irish Literary Cookbook last weekend and was thrilled to find a recipe for these mysterious treats alongside sixty-six other recipes gathered from food references in the writing of twelve Irish authors, including Beckett and Shaw. Crack it open for a satisfying literary and gastronomic adventure, and let the sating begin. —Elizabeth Nelson

This week I attended a reading of Dante’s Inferno inside Saint John the Divine cathedral, a massive Gothic-revival church near Columbia University. If you missed it, mark the date. It happens annually on Maundy Thursday (which, for those needing to brush up on their Christian calendar, commemorates the day of the Last Supper). It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. A wooden pew is really the only place one should learn about Hell. —Allison Bulger